Friday, January 12, 2007

An exciting new development in the marketing of imperialism...!

(...and the Super Bowl ads should kick total ass!)

More "collateral damage" in our president's new public relations commitment to prove that the War on Terror (has that been trademarked yet...?) is truly a worldwide endeavor...not just an invasion and occupation of a country with a whole bunch of oil within its borders...

So more than two dozen innocent human beings, men, women and children, including a four-year-old boy, had to die -- for the sake of a talking point, for the sake of propaganda, for the sake of escalating an illegal war that has itself killed more than 600,000 innocent people. They are literal sacrifices on the altar of Bush's arrogance.

In a separate, but sickeningly related story, there comes this news of what is literally an act of war by the U.S. against Iran. Try as I might, I haven't seen much mention of this anywhere in the mainstream news...

There have been many criminal episodes in the history of the United States government; but I am hard-pressed to think of one that has been so egregiously stupid and self-destructive, and so riddled with pathological aberrations.

Hard on the heels of Bush's bellicose language against Iran in his "New Way Forward" speech comes news that American forces stormed an Iranian consulate in Iraq in a heavily armed raid – including five helicopters – with threats to kill the Iranian diplomats inside if they did not surrender.

As Glenn Greenwald notes: "Isn't it a definitive act of war for one country to storm the consulate of another, threaten to kill them if they do not surrender, and then detain six consulate officers?" Glenn – who with his usual dispatch has been all over Bush's rush to encompass Iran in the hellfire of his Middle East rampage – knows full well the answer to his rhetorical question: Yes, it is a definitive act of war.